The Musk Tesla Roadster Library
Posted: Sun Feb 11, 2018 7:57 pm
Turns out there was a quartz disc for human knowledge in that roadster with who knows what all else. The first Sun orbiting Library has been created.
"There was a second payload on board the SpaceX Falcon Heavy that launched Tuesday (Feb. 6), and (unlike the Tesla Roadster) it's built to last 14 billion years.
SpaceX confirmed during its pre-launch livestream that the gadget, called an Arch, is tucked away somewhere inside the red Tesla Roadster now floating through space. It's a simple-looking object: a clear, thick disk of quartz crystal, about an inch across, with lettering across its face. It could almost be a small business award — best car dealership maybe, or top pizza restaurant — except for the data etched microscopically into its body with powerful, high-frequency lasers.
And that data, or at least the future suggested by that data, is what earned the Arch a ride aboard the Roadster.
Pronounced "ark" as in "archive," it's part of a very Silicon Valley plan to — as technology investor, self-described futurist and Arch Mission Foundation co-founder Nova Spivack explained it to Live Science — create "a self-replicating, meta-level process to perpetuate human civilization."
The Foundation picked the quartz discs for this task because they can store a lot of information very compactly, without degrading much at all over long time spans. Each laser-inscribed point on the disc is just 200 nanometers wide (a bit bigger than a single HIV virus), but can encode six bits of information, Spivack said. And as long as the quartz isn't shattered or blasted with intense waves of radiation, those points should be legible to anyone with the technology to view them — even millions (or perhaps billions) of years in the future. https://www.space.com/39660-arch-space- ... ne+Feed%29
"There was a second payload on board the SpaceX Falcon Heavy that launched Tuesday (Feb. 6), and (unlike the Tesla Roadster) it's built to last 14 billion years.
SpaceX confirmed during its pre-launch livestream that the gadget, called an Arch, is tucked away somewhere inside the red Tesla Roadster now floating through space. It's a simple-looking object: a clear, thick disk of quartz crystal, about an inch across, with lettering across its face. It could almost be a small business award — best car dealership maybe, or top pizza restaurant — except for the data etched microscopically into its body with powerful, high-frequency lasers.
And that data, or at least the future suggested by that data, is what earned the Arch a ride aboard the Roadster.
Pronounced "ark" as in "archive," it's part of a very Silicon Valley plan to — as technology investor, self-described futurist and Arch Mission Foundation co-founder Nova Spivack explained it to Live Science — create "a self-replicating, meta-level process to perpetuate human civilization."
The Foundation picked the quartz discs for this task because they can store a lot of information very compactly, without degrading much at all over long time spans. Each laser-inscribed point on the disc is just 200 nanometers wide (a bit bigger than a single HIV virus), but can encode six bits of information, Spivack said. And as long as the quartz isn't shattered or blasted with intense waves of radiation, those points should be legible to anyone with the technology to view them — even millions (or perhaps billions) of years in the future. https://www.space.com/39660-arch-space- ... ne+Feed%29
